A Better World than This (29 page)

In bed she curled herself up into a ball. ‘Back to the womb,’ Florence had told her. ‘Proving you haven’t freed yourself yet from the umbilical cord, even though your mother is dead.’

It was all right Florence thinking she knew it all, but no one knew
everything
. One thing Daisy knew for certain and that was that the letter she had written to Sam was a disgrace. Boring and unloving. She closed her eyes, willing a sleep that would not come. But how could she write what she wanted to, putting her feelings down in black and white? The very mention of the word ‘divorce’ still upset her. Three out of every hundred marriages ended in divorce these days, and the figure was rising all the time.

Look how quickly the country had got rid of the new King when he wanted to marry Mrs Simpson. The newspapers had printed the news about the friendship, as they called it, in even bigger letters than the news about the Jarrow marchers. What Daisy’s mother had said about Mrs Simpson couldn’t stand repetition. Florence had said Mr Baldwin should keep his mouth shut till he knew what he was talking about!

Florence said that Joshua Penny was one of nature’s
gentlemen
. Florence said that Bobbie Schofield had twinkle toes but nothing between the ears. Florence said that Mr Leadbetter’s laugh wasn’t a laugh but a nervous tic. Florence said that Jimmy was a victim of circumstance and would probably end up in Borstal. Florence said the Depression had merely weeded out the people too inefficient to find work. Florence said. … Florence said. …

Daisy sighed. There were days when she wished her friend would, just for once, express a bit of self-doubt. Would stop and question her strong beliefs. Not be such a clever-clogs all the time.

‘Bound in to saucy doubts and fears. …’ The quotation came unbidden into her tired mind. Shakespeare, she wondered? Florence wouldn’t need to wonder. Florence would know!

The next Sunday Florence got off the Blackburn train, walked with her mannish loping stride down the slope and out into the Boulevard. Past Queen Victoria, regal on her plinth, down past the White Bull, across the road to Woolworth’s, then along the street flanking the market square.

Now, on that Sunday morning, the visionaries and the cranks and buskers had taken over. In the shadow of the Victoria Buildings a man stood on an orange-box, shouting the odds at the top of his voice to a small crowd gathered round him. What would his subject be? Florence guessed either the Means Test, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler, Mussolini, the British Union of Fascists, Free Speech or Communism. One of those burning questions for sure. All of them controversial. She wished she had time to cross over and do a spot of heckling.

She thought she caught a glimpse of Strong Dick, the local escapologist, who delighted his audience by wriggling free of his ropes and chains while his mate went round with the hat, then she remembered that Thursday afternoon was Strong Dick’s day for performing his act.

We are all bound and shackled in some way, she told herself, passing the school clinic, then St John’s Church with a stream of worshippers coming out with hurried steps on their way home to a Sunday dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If they were lucky. Glancing upwards at the reed and shuttle weather-vane, she reminded herself that the lovely old church had been consecrated at the time of the French Revolution. A pity that same spirit of revolution hadn’t gripped folks up here, she told herself, but along with so many other things patriotism was a dying virtue. The Depression was making people apathetic.

Daisy was so
insular
minded, she told herself, turning into the familiar street at the side of the pie shop and beginning her climb away from the town centre. Daisy’s horizons were set no further than her own front door, her mind cluttered with trivia. Wash-basin taps, wallpaper, curtaining by the yard, bleached twill sheets – oh, the mediocrity of it all!

And that man of Daisy’s, with his crisp black hair and his craggy dimples, like the hero of some stupid romance. Daisy was so guileless, so
innocent
, in spite of having spent an entire night in the arms of her lover. Florence felt her neck grow hot. She unfastened her scarf.

Samuel Barnet was a cad. She felt it in her big bones. He was
using
Daisy, and one day he would go back to his wife. His sort
always
went back to their wives in spite of all that talk about divorce and separation.

The house Florence had been born in was the only one in the street with an unmopped front step. So cleanliness wasn’t necessarily next to godliness, Florence told herself, raising her hand to the iron knocker set high on the shabby front door.

‘I could swear I just saw Florrie Livesey walk past the house.’ Straightening up from pawing over the flocks in the mattress of the bed she had shared with Arnold since their marriage, Edna pushed past their Betty, bless her, and made for the top of the stairs. But by the time she reached the front door and
wrenched
it open the street was empty and Florrie Livesey, if indeed it had been she, had vanished.

‘There’s summat up. I’ve got one of my prepositions,’ Edna told Arnold. He was hammering leather toecaps on to a pair of shoes, the last held firmly between his bony knees. ‘I’ll be glad when Easter comes and I can see for myself. Daisy sounded right powfagged in her last letter. She’s bitten off more than she can chew with that lodging-house. I could have told her so at the time, but would she listen? Not on your nelly. I reckon her brain’s been a bit addled since our Martha passed on.’

‘Daisy knows what she’s doing.’ Arnold spoke through a mouthful of tacks. ‘We’re going for a bit of a holiday, not to put the cat among the pigeons, so don’t go putting your spoke in where it’s not wanted.’

Edna shot him a withering glance. ‘I’ll speak my mind. I’ve never done nowt else, have I?’

‘Never!’ said Arnold as, totally unbidden, an image of Edna’s grey permed head sticking up from the ground like a tent-peg appeared beneath the hammer he was wielding with quite unnecessary force.

‘Before you go,’ said Matthew Livesey, humbled and docile in his striped flannel shirt, ‘I would like you to join Nora and me in a prayer.’ To Florence’s acute embarrassment he knelt down on the rug her mother had once pegged and clasped his huge hands together.

There was more grey in his hair than when Florence had last seen him, but his eyes were clear and bright and the puffiness had gone from his face, smoothing his features into a semblance of uncharacteristic passivity. Nora was growing the peroxide from her hair so that it sprouted mousily from the parting, ending in yellowed tips as though she had accidentally trailed it through a tin of paint. She too clasped her hands together and closed her eyes.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.’ Matthew’s voice was resonant and deep.

‘I will
not
kneel down,’ Florence told herself, lowering her head and closing her own eyes in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I would feel a fool. I will
not
be made to pray when I don’t feel like it. Oh, God, this is awful. I wish I’d never come. He doesn’t need me, not now he’s got religion and Nora. He is transformed, and it’s a terrible thing. God knows why, but I almost prefer him ranting and raving with the drink inside him. This is
obscene
.’

‘He hath exalted the humble and meek,’ intoned Matthew. ‘Seek ye the Lord,’ said Matthew. ‘Amen,’ answered Nora.

Thinking they were finished, Florence raised her head to see them swaying together, eyes rolled up ceilingwards in a fervour of uncontrolled emotion.

‘I’ve got a train to catch,’ she whispered in desperation.

Bending her head, she stared down at her net gloves folded neatly on her knees. She tried to make her mind a blank, but that was something she had never been very good at. She distanced herself from the small back living room with its square table in the middle and the shiny horsehair sofa flanking the fireplace, with yesterday’s ashes forcing the ashpan out into the hearth.

Daisy would be in the kitchen now, flushed from the heat of the oven, basting the nice piece of topside she’d got from the butcher the day before. Putting the par-boiled potatoes round the joint, mashing the carrots with a knob of butter, and making the custard to go with the apple sponge pudding risen to a brown glossiness with the apples spiced with just a sprinkling of cinnamon underneath.

Sunday to Daisy meant a roast dinner. Chapel first, of course, but since moving to Blackpool there hadn’t been time for regular worship. Florence had been twice to the evening service with Joshua Penny. Surprised to find he had a pleasant light baritone voice, but why surprised? Joshua was a musical man, after all. She had seen him sitting in the armchair in his room, listening to a concert on the wireless, head back, eyes closed, somehow disarmed and helpless in his enjoyment of the soaring music. Played so quietly with the sound turned
low
, because Joshua was first and foremost a considerate man.

Florence could remember every detail of what she liked to think of as her growing relationship with the softly-spoken cultured man who came and went from the house, offering help at times, and keeping out of the way at others. Again she saw herself working with him at stripping endless walls of endless layers of wallpaper. Again she walked with him along the promenade, feeling the touch of his hand on her arm as they crossed the street.

Joshua was a lonely man; she had sensed that from the very beginning. A
good
man. Look at the way he managed to curb Jimmy’s boisterous ways when he could see that Daisy was at the end of her tether. Florence’s mother had always maintained that if a man was good with children that said everything there was to know about him. Kindness, the quality that counted more than any other. Stubborn perhaps, and rude when he wanted to be, but that made him more of a man, tempered his gentleness with a touch of masculine superiority.

‘I was made whiter than snow,’ said Matthew.

‘Let my voice cry unto Thee,’ replied Nora.

I love him, Florence’s heart cried. Oh, why didn’t I realize that before? If ever a man cried out for a woman’s love, a woman’s touch, then that man was Joshua Penny. He
admired
her, she had sensed that. He tolerated Daisy, but he admired
her
. When they talked about music and literature, his brown eyes sparkled. When he moved she was conscious of his strength and his gentleness. The combination of the two qualities was irresistible. When she was with him she could forget her own height, the angular set of her body; he was not the kind of man, she was convinced, who set great store on feminine beauty. In one way he was totally unobservant, wrapped up in himself, she had to admit that. But not in a selfish way, never that. He had suffered greatly in the trenches during the war, she guessed that without him having said so. Losing his wife had deepened that sadness. He was
crying
in the dark, and the flame consuming
her
could warm
him
, comfort him. She was strong, both in body and spirit; she had no time for the dreamy defeated kind of woman. She could bring him to life again.

‘For the sake of Thy dear Son, Jesus Christ,’ said Matthew.

‘Amen,’ said Nora.

‘I have a train to catch,’ said Florence, as they got up from their knees.

‘May God go with you,’ her father said, genuinely touched by the rapt unseeing expression in his daughter’s eyes.

‘I think we may have saved another soul,’ he told Nora, as the front door closed behind Florence. ‘The light was on her. She has stopped seeing through a glass darkly.’

‘Praise the Lord,’ said Nora.

Edna missed seeing Florence walking back down the street because they were round the table eating their Sunday dinner. But if she had been standing on the front doorstep Florence would have looked straight through her. As if in a trance, she put one large foot in front of the other, her unbuttoned coat flowing tent-like round her, the net gloves for once pushed deep into a pocket, and the ugly green hat slightly askew on the head that looked just too small for the rest of her.

Joshua. Joshua. His name was a hymn singing in her veins. Her life had been a barren waste up to now. How could she have considered going on with it as it was? Kow-towing to stupid people because Daisy said she had to.
Tolerating
them because they were paying for the privilege of being cosseted? Unlessoned minds; women with red hands swollen with work, cloth-capped men with their brains in their trousers, unruly children bringing sand in on their shoes. She could
pity
them, but unlike Daisy she could not love them. She thought of Daisy, for ever striving to please, loving a man who was not worthy of her love, giving him her unquestioning loyalty because he was the first man who had looked upon her and told her she was beautiful.

Joshua was not a man to tolerate fools gladly; she knew that, too.

She was passing the pie shop when she saw the Rolls-Royce parked in the short street outside the mill. She was hesitating, unable to believe her eyes, when she saw Sam Barnet get out from the driving seat, holding the door open for a squat little man wearing a black overcoat and a black homburg hat. She stepped back into the shadow of the greengrocer’s shop, her foot squelching on a rotten tomato. She saw Sam back the car smoothly up the short street, reverse into the traffic-free Sunday street, and drive on away from her, passing so close to where she stood she saw the sculptured line of his handsome profile and the way his black hair curled up over the back of his chauffeur’s peaked cap.

‘I have a train to catch,’ she reminded herself, forcing herself to come out from her hiding-place and start walking towards the station. There would be an explanation for it, she told herself. Sam’s boss had made an unexpected trip up north. Sam hadn’t
known
he was coming, it had all been arranged so quickly he hadn’t had time to tell Daisy. Florence quickened her steps. But to be less than twenty-five miles away – miles that could be covered in a car like that at the blink of an eyelid. But then it wasn’t Sam’s car. He was on
duty
. He couldn’t expect his boss to give him hours off to see his son, even if that son was merely a handful of miles away. She was being ridiculous, jumping to conclusions, refusing to give Samuel Barnet the benefit of the doubt.